August 2021 performance update
Hi friends, here with a quickly monthly performance update. The key numbers:
Prime picks: -1.48%
Select picks: +0.31%
SPY S&P 500-Tracking ETF: +2.55%
Bogleheads portfolio (80% VTI + 20% BND): +1.82%
While pleased to the Select portfolio continuing its better 2021 than 2020, I am naturally disappointed by Prime’s August. On the one hand, we had a few big losers in the month (IPGP down 22.29%, TTWO down 8.23% possibly related to China gamer-crackdown news); on the other hand, that’s the nature of running a more concentrated portfolio than finance treatises would typically advise. Some down months are surely to be expected, but tough to swallow when the market is up as much as it was in the month. Frankly, if the market is going to rise relatively linearly (note the more or less straight black line below on a YTD basis), one would be hard pressed not to index hard on it. The history of financial markets teaches that the market overall doesn’t, however, tend to just increase linearly. It’s a long game and there are plenty of risks on the horizon (more China news, rate increases/Fed tapering asset purchases, growth re-forecasting, delta/lambda/other novel covid variants), so in the meantime I’ll look ahead and hope for better results in months to come in the event the rotation back to value stocks that some analysts think is likely to occur does in fact manifest.
